What Paul Graham Worked On
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
March 2021: What I Worked On
Paul Graham is one of the founders of a very popular and successful seed accelerator called Y Combinator which has been an early investor in many successful companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, Coinbase, Dropbox, Twitch, Reddit, DoorDash and many others.
He also founded Viaweb which was eventually bought out by Yahoo.
At the end of Paul’s tenure at Yahoo, Paul had an interesting conversation with his boss that he describes in this essay where his boss thought he was lying to him about why he was leaving Yahoo which Paul later realized was because his boss was afraid that he was going to start another company to compete with Yahoo. Keep in mind this was during the Dot Com bubble.
Here is how Paul describes this encounter:
“When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying. My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month. If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. This was the height of the Internet Bubble, and Yahoo was ground zero in it. My boss was at that moment a billionaire. Leaving then to start a new startup must have seemed to him in insanely, and yet also plausibly, ambitions plan.
But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately.”
Paul is also very widely known for his great writings that he’s done on his website, paulgraham.net, and for starting the website Hacker News.
In this essay Paul talks about his journey from college as an undergrad all the way to right after he transitioned out of his leadership role at Y Combinator.
It’s a very interesting journey and is filled with lots of great advice from his experiences.
Here is a link to the essay: What I Worked On (paulgraham.com)
